Monty and the Mugwumps

For the most part, reviewing games professionally is a great way to make a living, and it's understandable why so many want to head down that career path.

But picture the scene: you load up a game, and after 10 minutes, you know you've seen enough. You want nothing more than to shut it down and delete it from your handset, and move onto something that's more fun.

Unfortunately, this was my experience with Monty and the Mugwumps, yet I continued to beaver away in the genuine hope that there was gold under the surface. All for Pocket Gamer and you, of course.

Monty is a pointy spherical thing, and the Mugwumps are various monsters that like to eat pointy spherical things.

From a top-down perspective, the player guides Monty around the game's 80 open-plan levels, avoiding the Mugwumps, collecting coins, rescuing the Mini-Monty, and then exiting.

You do this by drawing lines for Monty to follow with your finger on the screen, and then releasing. If you (or the Mini-Monty) hit a Mugwump, it's Game Over and you're sent back to the level select screen.

Different Mugwumps possess different qualities, and while some follow a set patrol, forcing you to time your movement carefully, others will trail after you doggedly, requiring you to think less and move quickly.

All of this sounds okay on paper, but you quickly realise that the core gameplay is at best a bit on the dull side, and at worst a tedious slog involving copious amounts of trial and error, often let down by the unreliable controls.

The controls are as simple as I made them sound above, but because Monty doesn't move until you release, you often find your finger covering the path you've set for yourself, making knowing when to let go an issue.

Worse: if you so much as brush a wall, Monty will slow to a halt, and if a Mugwump runs into you at that point, then that's it. Add to this the frustration of having a Mini-Monty trailing after you and things get even more awkward. Monty junior has a terrible habit of getting in your way, making Monty senior bumble around slowly trying to re-find the path you set.

Later levels (which are all unlocked from the start, for a refreshing change) require you to also tap the screen to make Monty jump over lasers. This is predictably hit and miss, too.

The graphics, meanwhile, are underwhelming: while the Mugwumps themselves are well drawn and colourful, Monty seems oddly grainy, and the backdrops are composed of a plain screen with various ugly blocks making up the obstacles to avoid.

The lack of polish extends throughout the game. For example, every time you die on a level, there's no retry button. Instead, it plonks you back at the level select screen, where you have to scroll down a list of titles until you see the one you were on. This is a criminal oversight in a game with trial-and-error gameplay.

There's some satisfaction to be had from beating a particularly tricky level, though that's mainly because you know you won't have to ever load it again.

Some of the issues in Monty and the Mugwumps can, and probably will, be fixed by updates, but it will take a major reworking to fix the game's most damning failure: it just isn't much fun.